


Whistle and I'll Come to You

by racketghost



Series: Strange Moons [9]
Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Angst, Crowley Has Chronic Pain (Good Omens), Gratuitous use of metaphors, Historical References, Hurt No Comfort, Language is a living animal, M/M, Masturbation, Misunderstandings, Pining, Self-Hating Crowley (Good Omens), World War I, not yet, sorry - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-19
Updated: 2019-11-19
Packaged: 2021-02-12 20:50:14
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,182
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21482659
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/racketghost/pseuds/racketghost
Summary: It is all so tiny, so small— this bird and this canister and this bit of paper— all these tiny moving pieces that add up to affect something massive, so much greater than their individual parts.
Relationships: Aziraphale & Crowley (Good Omens), Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens)
Series: Strange Moons [9]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1480787
Comments: 115
Kudos: 529





	Whistle and I'll Come to You

**Author's Note:**

> Okay, so I know this is a series. But honestly, if you read this without having read the other parts you will not understand it. It is only a series because I am an absolute idiot and did not realize that I had about 300k of story in these fingers. So there will be one more part after this and then a proper chaptered story to finish it off. I'm sorry I'm a dunce. 
> 
> Huge thanks go to the lovely [nerdythangs](https://archiveofourown.org/users/nerdythangs/pseuds/nerdythangs) for the impromptu brainstorming session and for listening to me flail. Bless you. 
> 
> The title for this comes from one of my favorite ghost stories called "Oh, Whistle, And I'll Come To You, My Lad" by M.R. James (it has also been adapted many times to film!).  
—————  
Just gonna add a lil warning to this: this particular chapter is not very happy. But I don’t believe in angst for the sake of angst and this whole series is literally just me rewriting what I think happened in canon and thus follows the canon timeline (and we know how they end up ♥️)   
So please skip it if you are having a bad time or don’t want to read something that might make you sad. Wait until I have the last part and maybe future chapters up where you can zoom ahead to the happy times. Just lookin’ out for anyone who is also a soft squishy animal like myself.

I want to say I'm sorry for stuff I haven't done yet

\--"old college try", the mountain goats

The Forest of Argonne, Northern France

October 1918

Crowley has a penchant for shooting himself in the foot.

It is always the same: _get up there and make some trouble._

“Sure,” he mumbles to himself, and then silently, _just tell them the French are covering their flanks. See how that works out for everybody._

He is on his elbows, belly-down, in a flat bit of very wet earth. There are the long unfamiliar legs of an American soldier, also face-down, in front of him, drinking from a stream.

“Oi,” he whispers, “might wanna head back now,” Crowley is eyeing the dark hills above them, where there has been the occasional spray of bullet-fire whizzing from the bushes.

Those boots inch back towards his face and Crowley follows his lead, slithering easily backwards until they fall into the lip of indented earth these Americans have affectionately titled, “the pocket”.

“Thanks, limey,” he says, and slaps Crowley squarely on the arm.

He doesn’t like being thanked, even in the off-handed, vaguely sarcastic manner the soldiers go about it.

_You wouldn’t thank me,_ he thinks, _if you knew what I have done._

He hadn’t meant it— not really— when he had whispered the idea into General Alexander’s head. Major Whittlesey, the poor sop in charge of this American Expeditionary Force, had argued against such an order— he knew the toll of sending his battalion out into the enemy’s forest, whether the French were flanking them or not.

Crowley rubs his eyes beneath his glasses, weary by his own hand. He had only meant to urge them forward, get the ball rolling, move them out from that static position holed up in the middle of this dense French forest.

He is ready for all of this, this entire damnable campaign, this whole bloody war, to be over.

“Stanley took my lighter and got himself shot. Who’s got a Lucifer?”

Crowley isn’t sure if he will ever get over that charming American expression.

“Here,” he mutters, and passes the soldier a book of matches.

“‘Preciate it,” the boy says in what Crowley is sure is a very specific regional dialect of New York, and stoops below the sight line to light a cigarette. The glow on his face in the dark highlights the round cheeks, the chin very nearly bereft of stubble. 

Crowley isn’t sure when it happened— at what point in history that he started looking at humans— _really _looking at them— and realized how frightfully short their lifespans are. How they are all infants, perpetual children, even in old age.

They all look _so young_.

“You need one?”

A hand is offering him a cigarette, the still lit match. They have the distinct habit of not wasting anything, including matches. Crowley takes it delicately, unaccustomed to using such physical means for lighting cigarettes.

“Thanks,” Crowley says, and lights up, having half a mind to pass the match back to him.

“Best put that out then,” the dark head is nodding at the match that has burnt down to nearly the end, the flame licking along his finger, “don’t need a third man here.”

“Third man?” Crowley asks, and snuffs out the flame.

“The third man to use the same match gets shot,” the private shrugs, makes a vague gesture with his hand holding the cigarette, “or is just plain unlucky. Figure we got enough bad luck around here.”

The matches get passed back to him and he takes a long look at the box— _Lucifer_ _Brand_— at the nearly embossed letterpressed front: _to be kept dry_. Crowley, thinking not for the first time of holy water, wonders if the proprietors of these matches know how right they are.

He looks out across the ridge on the side of this hill he is sitting on, a group of mostly American soldiers surrounded on three sides by Germans. It is nighttime, but only just, and he can smell the supper-time cooking fires of the Germans wafting through the trees.

There are a few things he has learned sitting here in this pocket of earth, trapped with humans not even one-one-thousandth his age: first, they are almost entirely from that scrappy little stretch of land called Brooklyn, second, they all had a kind of Dickensian upbringing that consisted primarily of shoplifting food, and third, Crowley really_, really _likes them.

_How could I not?_ He muses, watching Private Manson tenderly close the eyes of his fallen comrade and immediately begin rummaging through his pockets.

“Time for sleep, gentlemen,” someone is saying, even though most of the battalion is already bedded in for the night.

A medic next to him studiously ignores the order, separating used bandages into three distinct piles by moonlight: ones that should have been thrown out, ones that should have been buried, and ones that should have been incinerated.

Crowley is not sure which of the piles is the least repulsive, and makes a note to miracle at least a few of them back to new.

Aziraphale would like that, he thinks, and folds himself into a bit of indented earth, staring up at the darkened canopy of tree leaves above.

_If he were here he would be miracling them entire barrels of fresh water and whole buffets of food. He’d be getting notes from his head office about gratuitous use of miracles again._

Crowley smiles in the dark, wondering where his angel is now.

_Hopefully at the bookshop. Hopefully giving the whole sleeping bit another go. Hopefully having good dreams._

It isn’t the first time he has set himself off to sleep wondering what Aziraphale had dreamt about that first time. If it hadn’t been such a terrible shock to see him there, in the middle of a desert, and if it hadn’t been such a nightmare to watch him get shot and then not even _react_ to the bullet hitting his leg— Crowley would’ve found the act of watching Aziraphale sleep to be endlessly entertaining. Better than any moving picture.

_What was happening in that dreamy little head of yours?_ He wonders, remembering all those tiny twitches, the way his eyebrows kept threading together, pulling apart, his lips pursing and unpursing.

_What was it you asked me? ‘how did you get your clothes on so fast?’_

He is smiling to himself, a hand draped lazily across his chest, still looking up at the canopy of leaves and the stars winking through them.

_So you were dreaming about me naked, then._

He closes his eyes, inhales, a smile on his face despite the snoring of the men next to him, the ever-present threat of artillery shells and poison gas.

He begins to fall asleep, wondering, not for the first time, if Aziraphale in his dream had liked what he saw.

* * *

There is the very distinct whizzing of a tea-kettle.

He is transported, instantly, to the backroom of the bookshop. Aziraphale never used miracles to heat his tea water, relying instead on an old copper kettle that screamed when the water was hot and a gas stove that barely fit the tea pot and was usually burdened down with surplus tins of cocoa.

But he is not in Aziraphale’s bookshop, in that backroom, and there are no angels here.

He blinks and steadies himself as the pocket comes alive with terror, men scrambling to duck under any bit of protection they can find.

“Private Richard, did you repair the lines?”

“No, sir.”

The telephone lines are cut, Crowley knows, because _he cut them_.

_Fuck_.

They are taking heavy friendly fire, a barrage of artillery shells from the rear, many miles away.

“How many birds do we have left?”

“Three.”

There is a tiny wicker basket on the ground nearest to a tree, tucked protectively amidst sundry supplies and the worthless round of telephone wire. The basket is cooing softly.

“Right,” Whittlesey is scribbling something in shorthand on a bit of paper, his tiny glasses slipping down his nose, “send this off.”

The private dips his hand into the basket and pulls out a gray pigeon, her feathers nearly iridescent in the morning light. She has a tiny canister fixed to her leg that opens to hold the bit of paper.

It is all so tiny, so small— this bird and this canister and this bit of paper— all such small moving pieces that add up to affect something massive, so much greater than their individual parts.

Crowley watches as the bird is lofted into the air and she begins a great flapping of desperate wings— and then is hit by oncoming artillery— and falls to the ground somewhere beyond them in the forest.

“_Fuck_,” the private is saying, scrambling to lift the second bird from the box, Whittlesey frantically penning another missive. A blast hits the ground just behind them— only a few meters away— and they are coated in the fine spray of dirt and tree bark.

There is the synchronized coughing of men trying to find air around the particles of airborne dirt, and then the frantic yelling of soldiers trying to find cover.

“_Richard._”

The private’s eyes are glassy as he fumbles with the basket again, trying to remove one bird and not release the other. He brushes away the fine coating of dirt along his forehead with his sleeve, takes the tiny message, slips it into her leg canister, whispers something in her ear.

This bird makes it further than her sister— out deeper into the forest. But there is the unmistakeable resounding din of German Gewehr 98s from behind them, shots firing out over their heads, and she falls somewhere in the thicket of trees.

“One left, sir.”

There is a shared stunned silence between officer and private, and then the last bird is lifted from her basket.

“Cher Ami,” is the whispered name as the private presses a kiss to her gray head.

He knows enough cobbled together French from his days here to hear the name as it actually is: _dear friend_.

“Make it home,” the private is whispering, “okay, girl?”

He isn’t sure why that pigeon, with her soft gray feathers and soft cooing sounds remind him of Aziraphale, his own dear friend. And he isn’t sure, not really, why he decides in that moment to draw up a miracle from Hell, to coat that bird with her single-minded instinct to fly home with a shield of invulernability, but he does.

He is a terrible demon, he knows. He knows it because what kind of demon has the lives of many hundreds of desperate and war-weary men in the palm of his hand that he could tempt with any number of easy temptations— a full-belly, privacy, for death to come swiftly and easily, for warm clothes and good alcohol and to see their families again— and instead uses his demonic gifts to bless this tiny bird that reminds him so minutely of another winged being?

She is nearly immediately shot down— a bullet through her breast. She falls with a puff of feathers until a blast of artillery shrapnel hits her tiny bird body and she disappears entirely into the forest floor.

There is a single moment where a thread of fear laces through Crowley’s body— _did it not work?_— and he looks down at his hand.

There have been a number of moments in Crowley’s existence where he realizes he has the power to turn the tide of history. A number of moments where a miracle, demonic or otherwise, would shape the future of the earth. It is an impossibly large responsibility, he thinks, and if Hell had any idea the kind of power that he wields up here he is sure that they would drag him down into some dank office space, force him to file paperwork for a few eternities instead.

So he keeps his demonic interventions small: cutting telephone wire, blocking streets with tipped over apple-carts, rerouting motorcades. He keeps his miracles small too: ceasefires for Easter Sundays, concealing soldiers moving south, blessing birds with cloaks of protection.

If all of those small things end up amounting to much larger things— so much greater than the sum of their parts— he tries not to think about it too much.

“She’s up!”

Crowley looks up to see feathers floating within the mote of sun beaming through the trees, a tiny body taking flight back home.

She disappears into the tree-line, out of sniper range, and within one half hour the shelling of friendly artillery ceases.

Later, he would come to find out that Cher Ami had been shot through her tiny breast, had been blinded in one eye, and had lost a leg. The army medics would not be able to understand how such a tiny thing had survived bullets that killed fully-grown humans, and when they fitted her with a tiny wooden replacement leg and sent her home to the United States with honors, they would whisper to themselves that an angel must have been watching that bird— _must have_— because there is no other explanation— and had saved the lives of one-hundred-and-ninety-four men.

Crowley, thinking about it all later, would agree with them— there had been an angel watching that bird, in a sense— because he performed miracles in the name of one— and his name was Aziraphale.

* * *

It is raining, and he has finally come home.

It had been a long and particularly _wet_ ride across the channel in a military convoy, the thin material of his army-issued jacket doing little to stymie the spray of salt water from reaching his skin.

He is _freezing_, his hair dripping down into his face— the top has gotten long again and has the irritating habit of falling into his eyes. He brushes it back with an unsteady hand, feeling wet and cold and thoroughly wrung out.

His bones ache with a familiar jutting pain— something about the rain makes the joints in his spine creaky, the junction of his thigh and hip tender, like it has been mashed into a fine pulp and is now only operating out of habit.

He has a long walk back to his flat and the night air is cool and misting, but it is strangely enjoyable to be back on familiar ground— the worn pavement of the only place he has ever called home beneath his feet.

He pulls his jacket collar up against the spray of rain and pulls a cigarette out from behind his ear, lights it with a bit of hellfire. The glow of the flame reflects down onto the wet stone underfoot and there is the passing refraction of his image in a glass shop window— the light throwing his angled face into warm lit relief for just a moment before vanishing.

He turns away from it sharply. He does not wish to see it, not when he has visions of Aziraphale in his head— of his bare pale thighs on that cot in the middle of some shitty military housing in a desert, of his pink feet along the edge of the bed and those ankles up by Crowley’s ears.

_I wish there was more of you_, he thinks, _more of you everywhere—_

The dull ache of arousal sits heavily in his belly. He has not been alone for weeks, not since getting back from Meggido, and the memory of their last meeting has been pulsing dully beneath his skin, in and out— like a heartbeat. Or a tide. Another familiar ache.

_More of you with me. Always._

He pulls out a long drag of his cigarette and exhales it into a passing streetlight, rearranges how his cock fits in his trousers.

_You needed me that night_, he thinks, _I don’t know why you did but you saw something in that dream and you actually asked for me. For _me.

There’s an urgency to his walk, an edging desire to be away from reflective surfaces and out of this rain, someplace _warm_ to soothe the stiffness of his joints and someplace safe to be alone with his memories.

He pauses for just a moment at the typical street he takes to Aziraphale’s bookshop, looks down the winding road with its gas-lit streetlamps and glowing shop windows. There is the pleasant clopping of horse hooves on pavement somewhere in the distance, and the petrol-powered rumbling of automobiles rolling up the street.

_Miss you_, he thinks, _always missing you_.

He has been in France long enough to pick up certain phrases, to overhear enough men saying things in their sleep. And although Crowley has never had a firm grasp of speaking, has never excelled at stacking words to create meaning— he can still admire the quiet simplicity of them, the poetry to be found in how other languages construct emotion out of letters.

“Tu me manques,” he says softly to the empty street, and remembers the French-Canadian soldier who had shared a cigarette in the trenches with him once.

_It is less, “I miss you,” _he had said, _and more,“you are missing from me.”_

He spares another glance down at that junction of where the road turns just so— where he knows you can see the shop from that corner, something pulling him toward it— and then he straightens, walks off toward Mayfair, tries not to look back.

_It is less, “I miss you, angel”, _he thinks,_ and more, “you are missing from me”._

* * *

His flat is exactly as he left it, pristine, dust daring not to fall while he was away. It is pleasant enough— bereft of reflective surfaces and spare, easy to clean.

He shivers and snaps his fingers, his clothes evaporating into something more comfortable, less cheap, more warm. Not that it matters— because his flat is stone, everywhere— stone walls and stone floors, a stone fireplace at the end of the hall and great lead-paned windows that are currently covered with a fine layer of soot from the factories of the city.

He grimaces at the dirt, having never cleaned them from the last time he was here, and lights a fire.

_Whiskey_, he thinks, pouring himself a glass,_ definitely whiskey_, and sits down in front of the fire.

There is no sofa here, not much in the way of chairs. But the floor isn’t so bad and it is warm by the fire and the burn of the whiskey is settling into a familiar heat in the pit of his stomach, pleasant and soothing.

_Angel_, he thinks, staring into the flames, _you are missing from me_.

He isn’t sure why he’s doing it— why his hand is already in his pants and is yanking them down his hips until his bare skin is against the cold floor. It is not as though he is feeling particularly amorous— not like other times when he could barely wait to get his cock in his hand and an orgasm out of his body. But he is alone, finally, and maybe more importantly than that— he is _lonely_.

Because he hasn’t seen Aziraphale for weeks, maybe a full month, and while that used to seem like no time at all, like minutes or maybe seconds before, now it feels like an eternity— like time suddenly stretches on forever and he needs it to come faster, _faster_. He needs the time again when they are together to be _now_— right now— because memories are swiftly becoming not enough to sustain himself on and he is drowning, _drowning_ in want.

_You are missing from me,_ he thinks again.

He closes his eyes and breathes out, feeling the warmth of the fire on his face, his hands, the bare skin of his belly where his shirt is riding up.

_What were you dreaming about, angel?_

He wraps a hand around himself and squeezes, pulls up, pushes down.

_Were you dreaming about me? About us? Was it that time in Kobarid?_

It feels like his blood begins flowing backwards and he tries to erase the heartsick memory of Aziraphale’s voice back then— _we should be more careful_— think instead of a better memory, a more recent one—

_Like the way you sound when you say _fuck_. Do you even know what that did to me? What that does to me even now? Those lips were made to say filthy things and I think you should say them more to me— if only I knew all of the buttons to push to make you say them._

He thinks of pushing Aziraphale’s legs back until that white bottom was presented so lovingly on the edge of the bed, the small shifting motions of the angel who was clearly a bit uncomfortable— whether with the act itself or the way his body looked splayed out like that— _stupid angel_, he thinks, _as if any part of you deserves to feel shame, to feel less than— you are perfect, perfect, ridiculous yes but also wonderful, full, soft—_

He has wrapped his free hand somewhere around the base of himself, trying to slow the steadily building climax, trying to stay here, along the edge of this memory of where they are together just a little while longer.

_Or that time in your bathroom where you pushed me down on the floor and —_

He gasps and opens his eyes, trying not to come. _Not yet_. He goes back— to earlier memories, less explicit ones: Aziraphale in Wessex in that waxed cotton tent, Crowley had walked in on him with his finger in his mouth, sucking on something like how humans suck on a paper cut— _and you had said my name again, my _real_ name, my chosen name, because you remembered it wasn’t Crawly anymore, remembered that was a dead name given to me in Hell—_

They had sat in the warm flickering silence of a brazier and Aziraphale had let Crowley get warm.

_Because you are always keeping me warm—_

And then an even earlier one, one of his favorites: Aziraphale in Rome in that white linen toga, their first shared food, the musical clinking of iridescent oyster shells stacked in ceramic bowls.

_“Oh there’s just a bit of”—_ and the angel had swiped a thumb across his cheek, just under his eye, underneath those glasses that barely shielded the demonic hue of them.

_Lemon juice_, he thinks, and then remembers the angel’s voice, _“oh well let me _tempt_ you to— oh wait that’s your job”_.

He tightens his hand and moves it faster, faster, remembering the taste of the angel’s skin— _everywhere— _between his legs and between his fingers and between his eyebrows— the way his mouth drops open and his eyes squeeze shut and the sounds he makes when he comes—

And he is lucky, _so lucky_, he knows, to know what such a thing sounds like, to know what that face looks like in the throes of an ecstasy so intense it could only be likened to divine.

Crowley is gasping in the empty space of his cold stony flat, thinking of Aziraphale’s gray eyes in that tiny bathroom late at night, how he remembered the length of his hair, the sound of his voice— _I did, I do_— and then he is coming all over his hands, body shuddering quietly on the floor. 

He swallows, his throat dry, and opens his eyes.

There is a lingering sense of shame as he looks down at himself, at his come spilled over the half-pulled down trousers, a bottle of whiskey next to him on the floor.

_I’m fucking pathetic_, he thinks, and stares into the fire.

He sits like that for a long while, just staring into the flame, and then miracles himself a towel, cleans himself up with it.

He throws it on the floor in front of the fire and stares at it with a sort of detached disbelief.

He feels _wrong_. Wrong in his own skin and wrong in his own home. Like he no longer fits here, like he has somehow outgrown it, or shrunk it in the laundry.

_How many times_, he wonders, _have I touched myself thinking of you?_

He knows the answer is somewhere hovering near _too many to count_, and covers his face with his hands.

The whiskey bottle tilts easily in his hands and back toward his throat as he takes a long pull off of it, the light of the fire refracting into the amber liquid.

His hair is hanging down over his face, damp from his misty walk home, and he pushes a frustrated hand through it, smoothing it back. A droplet of water falls and lands on his cheek, hovers there for a moment before dropping down to his jaw.

Crowley closes his eyes and swipes at it with his thumb— _‘Oh there’s just a bit of—‘_

He opens his eyes and looks up to the mantel across the fireplace, flicks his eyes over to the windowsill on the far wall.

_Lemon juice_, he thinks, and then Aziraphale, from before, saying, ‘_well let me tempt you— oh wait, that’s your job._’

_That’s my job_.

He takes another drink, straight from the bottle again, the alcohol burning his throat.

_‘Well let me tempt you—‘_

He blinks, something not sitting right in his brain.

“Well let me tempt you,” he says aloud.

Some indefinable fear settles across his chest, spiderwebbing out like a black tide across his nerve endings.

“That’s my job.”

He thinks back, to Aziraphale in the desert that first time— Crowley indisposed on the sand, touching himself with the angel so close-by— _so fucking stupid of me_, he thinks— Aziraphale only helping out because he was going to open up that wound on his hip that he had so studiously repaired, wrapped up.

His heart begins pounding in his chest, slamming itself against ribcage, trying to get free.

And then again— in that tiny damned bathroom, between his legs— the angel had been out of his mind, shell-shocked into something less than divine, less than resolute, something that questioned everything he had ever believed in— and Crowley had been _there_, between his legs, had offered to carry it but had maybe, _maybe_, just tempted him into something else, some other damnable offense.

It is getting remarkably difficult to breathe— all these tiny moments, all these tiny moving pieces adding up to be something much greater than their individual parts.

And _Kobarid_, that cotton tent— _damn tents to fucking hell_, he thinks— he had been shivering on the bed, under blankets, his bones aching with the cold and him asking for a miracle, for _something_, some degree of heat from somewhere. And Aziraphale had answered— _of course he did he’s a fucking angel_— sharing the warmth of his body and pressing all of that lovely softness against him and feeling all of his less-than-lovely hardness.

_Because you’re fucking insatiable— you used to think that just once would be enough, would slake this thirst_—

But it hasn’t, and it _won’t_, he knows, not until he is burnt up by it, consumed in it.

And then finally just a few weeks ago, again in the desert—_ always the fucking desert_— Aziraphale had finally asked for it, specifically _requested_ it, requested _him_—

But Crowley had done something, hadn’t he? He must have. Because he is suddenly understanding that perhaps he _isn’t_ a terrible demon, not really— perhaps his skill-set just veered away from earthly temptations and landed squarely in another arena— a highly specialized one.

Lust.

Crowley has the distinct and sudden memory of standing at the Crucifixion, of coming up beside Aziraphale standing there with his hands clasped in front of his chest and the angel looking surprised to see him at all, like he didn’t expect him to have known Jesus.

_’Oh, I’ve changed it.’_

_‘So what is it now? Mephistopheles? Asmodeus?’_

_‘Crowley’_

The fire makes a loud popping sound as a bit of air escapes the dry wood.

_Asmodeus_, he thinks, staring into the glowing embers, _he’s the demon of lust_.

There’s a kickback to his heartbeat, the beats so strong it feels like they are knocking him backwards, rocking him in empty air.

He scrambles for the whiskey bottle next to him, upending it into his mouth.

_Is that all this has been?_ He thinks wildly, _I’ve just been… tempting you?_

He grabs the towel with the evidence of his mess from the floor, tosses it into the fire. It alights itself, burns hot, burns out.

_Is that why you won’t let me say it? Why you won’t let me put words to it?_

He hears Aziraphale’s voice in his head, in that bathroom again, rising up from the dark on the tiled floor: ‘_don’t say it. You don’t have to say it’._

The remaining fringes of the towel glow red for a moment and then char into blackness, burnt into ash.

_Because we aren’t talking about the same thing. I have been shouting the word ‘love’ out to you and all you have been hearing is ‘lust’_.

His heart stops. He feels nothing. Curiously vacant.

Because he has the sudden and inexplicable realization that they have been speaking different languages to each other this entire time— maybe always, since the beginning. A mistranslation. Some failure of language.

He remembers lying along a railroad track, pulling telephone wire out of the earth, remembers thinking of Aziraphale reading books and speaking German:_ You were always a quick study. How many languages do you know?_

_Not mine_, he thinks, _not mine._

He curls over into himself, a collapsed question mark on the floor, hands weaving through his hair and pulling, _pulling_, until it hurts— because he deserves it to hurt, deserves much worse than just some surface-level pain of pulling hair and aching bones.

_I tempted you_. _I pulled you into sin_._ Why does everything I touch turn to ash_?

“I didn’t mean it,” he says to the empty room, to those oyster shells on his windowsill, to the fire, to anything that will listen, “I didn’t mean to do it.”

Or maybe it’s _Her_ he is speaking to without realizing it, without wanting to— some quiet plea to not hold it against that certain Principality of the Eastern Gate.

_It’s not his fault. Don’t blame him._

He squeezes his eyes shut as something uncomfortable pricks behind them, wetness rolling down his cheeks, _don’t let him turn to ash too._

“Blame me.”

He lays himself down on that cold stone floor and curls around his mid-section, something ancient and chronic in his bones screaming in protest, flaring against the lack of comfort, the lack of warmth, the lack of _softness_.

He opens his eyes and stares into the dying embers of the fire, remembering all at once the collection of times that Aziraphale had looked at him with those shifting watercolor eyes that couldn’t decide on a hue, and had thanked him, _thanked him_.

_You wouldn’t have ever thanked me, _he thinks, not blinking, _if you knew what I have done._

**Author's Note:**

> Cher Ami was a real bird with that real story (the Lost Battalion) and they did not know that she was female until they stuffed her (for the sake of storytelling though, they knew she was a girl). She died in my home state of New Jersey and I have seen her little stuffed body on display once and it was profoundly moving. Much respect to all of the service animals who have died in our silly human wars <3
> 
> Thank you always always always for leaving me comments. I love them. They make writing worth it.
> 
> (As always) come yell at me on [Tumblr!](https://racketghost.tumblr.com)


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